Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of fifty-seven. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 20m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred ninth day.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Downtown Whitewater Inc. Board at 5 PM.
On this day in 1915, actor and filmmaker Orson Welles is born in Kenosha.
Recommended for reading in full:
Margaret Sullivan writes Mark Zuckerberg claims that, at Facebook, ‘the future is private.’ Don’t believe him:
Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s annual Silicon Valley confab to announce that “the future is private.”
In one of the most awkward moments I’ve ever seen captured on video, he smiled broadly as he tried to joke about the supposed change of direction.
“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” he said.
No, Zuck, you don’t. Facebook is facing more than a dozen international investigations into its history of privacy violations, Wired magazine has reported — “from its years of willy-nilly data sharing to several recent data breaches.”
Zuckerberg seemed to think his lame line would get some good-natured guffaws. The audience of technophiles, though, didn’t find it amusing. The reaction was pained silence with a few cringe-induced laughs.
The “pivot to privacy” simply isn’t believable.
“On privacy, I would suggest what Facebook is doing is more about public relations,” venture capitalist Roger McNamee told Hanna Kozlowska of Quartz. “[It has] tried to put a positive spin on something that they’re doing for business reasons, and would have done anyway.”
John Cassidy writes After a Strong Jobs Report, Economic Questions Linger for 2020:
In their latest projections, [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome] Powell and his colleagues said that they expect G.D.P. growth of 2.1 per cent in 2019 and 1.9 per cent in 2020, which is about in line with the maximum rate that they think the economy can sustain over the long term. The White House claims that its tax cuts and regulatory bonfire have transformed the economy’s productive potential by supercharging business investment, but this theory lacks empirical support. The relevant measure of investment “accelerated a bit in the first half of 2018, but has since slowed significantly,” the writer Mark Whitehouse, of Bloomberg, points out. “In the first three months of 2019, it was up an annualized 2.7 percent, well short of the 5.3 percent average for the current expansion.” About the only thing that has really shot up since the tax cut is the scale of corporate stock buybacks.